Mike Littwin

Littwin: Ken Buck toeing the punch line

If Christine O'Donnell is America's newest punch line, one person who can't be laughing is Ken Buck.

OK, maybe he is chuckling. I mean, the stuff about O'Donnell, the surprise Republican senatorial nominee from Delaware, is really funny — even funnier than Dan "Serpico" Maes.

Any time you can put "senatorial candidate" and "masturbation" in the same sentence, you know you're in business. And, yes, there are Onion- style TV clips of O'Donnell voicing her opposition to masturbation as adultery. I just hope it doesn't make me go blind writing about it.

The problem for Buck is that if you're a Tea Party candidate and people keep laughing at all the other Tea Party candidates, you risk becoming your own punch line.

He already had Maes and Tom Tancredo running alongside him, which is, at minimum, an interesting visual. He already had the Bennet campaign linking him to Tea Partyers such as Sharron Angle and Rand Paul — because the last thing Michael Bennet wants to do is remind voters of the Democratic Congress.

In his primary run, Buck had provided devastating audio for a devastating Bennet ad, in which we see and hear Buck addressing audiences on matters like Social Security and abortion. Buck complains the ad is unfair — and it does hit him unfairly on student loans — but it would be unfair in context only if Buck hadn't been all over the place on Social Security or if he hadn't gone out of his way to pander to Tea Party crowds.

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I mean, it was Buck who — for part of one night anyway, before he thought better of it — agreed with a questioner about repealing the 17th Amendment, which, I'm sure we all remember from high school, calls for the direct election of senators. That's real punch line material.

It's easy to caricature Tea Partyers as a fringe group. But it's actually that rare thing — an actual grassroots organization. The anger is real. The civil war within the Republican Party is real, too. And suddenly — and maybe this is surreal — it seems that the Tea Partyers are winning.

What's inarguably true is the Tea Partyers keep nominating people who are impossible not to caricature — like Angle, like Paul, like Maes.

And now comes O'Donnell, who, like Maes, can't actually win. Her problems don't end with what happens under the sheets. There's also what happens in the bushes.

You've probably read the stories. O'Donnell faces myriad financial issues. And there are conspiracy issues (there's a Vince-Foster-was-murdered TV clip, too). And there's the townhouse issue. Her campaign apparently pays half the rent because it's also her campaign office, and maybe because she made only $5,800 last year. And then there's the issue of her townhouse shrubbery, which is apparently included in the rent, and yet does not come entirely free.

This is how O'Donnell put it to The Weekly Standard: After a hard day of campaigning, she has her staff "check all the bushes and check all the cars" around her townhouse because, she said, her opponents have been known to hide there.

We're definitely in Maes territory here. No wonder Karl Rove had questioned her "rectitude, truthfulness and sincerity of character" while also calling her "nutty." He didn't mention paranoid, but I guess he ran out of time. That was on the day of the Delaware primary, when O'Donnell hadn't yet upset Mike Castle.

Two days later, to the surprise of no one, Rove had changed his mind — deciding not to fight with the Palin wing of the party — and was reluctantly endorsing O'Donnell.

O'Donnell's victory is the story of this election season so far, which is also the story of the growing power of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. It was easy enough to guess long ago that Republicans would lose control of the Tea Partyers, but no one could have guessed, even two weeks ago, that O'Donnell would beat Castle, a force in Delaware for 40 years. It came just after Palin and the Tea Partyers had knocked off Lisa Murkowski in Alaska.

O'Donnell won even though Republicans kept insisting that Castle, who was heavily favored to win in November, could give the Republicans a shot at winning back the U.S. Senate. This possibility seemed to matter not at all to the voters.

The thing about revolutionaries is their devotion to purity, and Castle, a moderate, was not nearly pure enough. That's what makes Rove so nervous. And it's what has to make Buck nervous as well.

Colorado is a moderate state, where, as in most states, the winning candidate is the one who successfully claims the center. That's why the race here — and the race nationally — has become about Barack Obama vs. the Tea Party. That's why Colorado Democrats are thrilled to see O'Donnell come along. Writers keep digging up new quotes from her. The latest is that she once said condoms are "anti-human." I'm serious.